The Many Reflections of Miss Jane Deming

by J. Anderson Coats

  Miss Bradley said good luck. Miss Gower did what she could to help, even if that was only giving me a job invigilating.

  “Now I really don’t want you to go,” I whisper.

  Miss Gower fidgets with her spectacles. “Seattle has become a village of schoolteachers. If you continue to learn everything you can from them, you will prevail.”

  “Prevail. Is that Latin too?” I don’t care, not really, but it will keep her here and talking that much longer.

  “It is,” Miss Gower replies with that delightful raised eyebrow I just can’t seem to imitate. “From val–ere, to be worth, and prae, because of. Those who pursue knowledge for its own sake because it’s worth something.”

  All at once I see what Miss Gower is trying to big-word at me. Here in Seattle, I can likely go back to school. Mrs. D was ready to let me sit for lessons in the lifeboat until she learned who was in charge of them. If Miss Gower’s not the teacher anymore, Mrs. D will have less trouble sending me to recite for Julia or Ida or whatever miss is holding class here right now.

  Which is nice and all, but none of my friends approached Mrs. D in the saloon that morning and Latined me a position in her lifeboat school for a dollar a week.

  Miss Gower squeezes my hand and turns to go. She’s still not the sort of person you hug without warning, but I can’t help myself. I throw my arms around her tight. I don’t expect her to hug me back, but she pulls me close and pats my shoulders just like Mama used to all those years ago.

  12

  JER IS STILL HAPPY EATING with Jimmie Lincoln, and Mrs. Pollard is content to keep him, so I join Nell and Ida and Julia Hood for supper.

  The girls have all been here for days, so they’ve already met Seattle’s leading citizens and seen the parts of town those citizens want seen. Nell’s grin is devilish when she reveals that the buildings without signs I saw on my way to the hotel are dens of vice.

  That certainly wasn’t in the pamphlet. Nell must be mistaken. Seattle isn’t San Francisco by a mile and change.

  “Your schooner is the last of us to arrive,” Ida says as the plates are cleared. “We thought maybe you’d decided to settle elsewhere.”

  That must be why so few people were on the wharf to greet us. Our little vessel out of Port Townsend was a boatload of widows, and all the girls came ahead of us. The girls were who everyone was waiting for. Not a passel of widows trailing children.

  “I’m glad you didn’t, though,” Julia puts in.

  “They expected hundreds of us, did you know?” Nell says. “They had everything ready for us back in January. People volunteered to let us sleep on their floors in bedrolls.”

  “They’re mad as anything that they did all this work and gathered so many supplies and had a reception planned—and we never showed!” Ida laughs and shakes her head.

  “Are they still willing?” I ask, because if we don’t have to pay for a hotel, my invigilating money will go a lot further.

  “Ask Mrs. Yesler,” Nell replies. “She got each of us a place to board. The Carrs couldn’t be more wonderful. Although I thought the harpy meant to marry right away. A banker.” She’s teasing, and I smile because I’ve missed Nell sorely, and teasing Mrs. D is always an amusing sport. My heart’s not in it today, though.

  “I suppose I should go find Mrs. Yesler,” I say, but Nell is pulling a familiar deck of cards from her reticule.

  “I’m sure it’s already handled,” Nell says. “Seattle ladies are absolutely delightful. Who’s ready to lose badly at whist?”

  Julia makes a show of cracking her knuckles, and Ida pours everyone another cup of tea.

  So I sit. I let things be handled and just play cards with my friends.

  Mrs. Pollard brings Jer when she has to take Jimmie Lincoln out back to wash the eggs out of his hair. I start to get up, but Ida says, “Don’t you dare. We need a fourth.”

  So Jer sits on my lap, and I let him put down hearts and spades as I point to them. He giggles when the girls pronounce him ready for the card rooms of San Francisco.

  “All right, you lot,” the hotel owner says.

  I look up, but he’s not talking to us. He’s facing the men still sitting in the parlor with their hands folded and their big boots awkward under fancy chairs.

  “Either pay for a room or go elsewhere,” the owner goes on. “The stable’s half-price.”

  The bachelors don’t argue or protest or threaten. They simply file out through the dining room, staying close to the wall opposite. A few glance our way, but most face forward and button their coats against the downpour echoing on the roof.

  Like this is something they do every night.

  “You won’t believe this,” Ida says in a low voice as she fans out her cards, “but Mr. Mercer took three hundred dollars from every single one of them.”

  I don’t want to believe that, but after what happened on the wharf, I think I have to.

  “I was on the first schooner that arrived from Port Townsend.” Nell smirks. “There were those poor fools on the beach, fresh from their homesteads in grubby trousers and torn greatcoats, waiting to go straight to the preacher. You should have seen their faces when we all walked past them to the hotel. I thought they’d lynch Old Pap on the nearest tree!”

  “They can’t make us marry them, can they?” Julia whispers.

  Ida and Nell both make disparaging noises, and Julia’s cheeks go pink. Mine, too, probably, because three hundred dollars is an unfathomable lot of money, and lynching is serious business.

  “Mrs. Carr told me to take all the time I needed to make wise decisions.” Nell shifts cards in her hand. “I’m not to feel hurried or unwelcome in her home.”

  “I feel sorry for them,” I say. “Mr. Mercer led them to believe one thing, but they ended up with something completely different.”

  Maybe he gave them a different pamphlet. Reflections Upon Your East Coast Bride.

  “Me too, a little,” Nell replies, “but just because they gave Asa Mercer money doesn’t mean I’m in any hurry to marry one of them. He’s the one who made promises, not me.”

  “Mr. Mercer certainly didn’t mention this fact when I asked him for particulars back in New York,” Ida adds.

  Useful employment. That’s what Mr. Mercer told Mrs. D in the parlor of Lovejoy’s. She’s the one who asked about bachelors, and that’s when he started rambling about gentlemen and opportunity.

  “Won’t they be angry?” I ask.

  Nell shrugs. “They won’t be angry with us. They’ll be angry—and rightly so—with Mr. Mercer.”

  The last of the men to leave is the ruddy, burly one who handed Jer the jerky. We’re on the other side of the room, but he catches my eye and gives a shy little half wave.

  “You’ve been here three hours and already you’ve got a sweetheart?” Ida teases.

  “He tried to feed my brother shoe leather.” I pet Jer’s hair. “It was odd, but kind.”

  “You won’t find anyone kinder than Mr. Wright,” Nell says. “He’s the one I feel sorry for. He came all this way, and he’ll go home empty-handed. Yet again.”

  “Don’t gossip, Nell.” Julia puts down the ten of clubs.

  “What? It’s true.” Nell scowls at her cards. “He’s not the sort of man any of us will look at twice. For my part, I couldn’t marry someone who already got his heart broken.”

  My heart got broken in moments and hours and days. First, the casualty list had to be wrong. Then, there had to be two Henry Demings in the regiment, both from Windward, and the dead one was not my father. At length the parcel came from Papa’s commanding officer with his watch and a packet of letters from us, and that’s when he was really gone.

  Mrs. D got her heart broken at the same stroke and turned prickly and short with everyone, even neighbors who also knew loss. Even me. Especially me, and especially if I cried in front of her. She could bear it, she said, if she didn’t have to think about it, and if I was falling to pieces she’d have to think about it. />
  Then Jer was born, and I finally had someone to talk to. Someone who didn’t mind if I cried. Someone else who needed a papa when every last one was getting chewed up on some Southern battlefield.

  So I made us flapjacks in animal shapes. I told stories with silly voices. I caused our broom to have an accident, then from the handle I made us a stick horse to share named Bartleby.

  Getting your heart broken isn’t something you can control. But you can decide whether you’re going to be nasty to the neighbors or offer jerky to hungry children you don’t even know, just because they’re hungry.

  Mrs. Grinold comes over to our table. “Jane, sweetheart, I arranged a hotel room for your family for the night. Your stepmother’s there now. I promised I’d take you and Jer up and make sure you latched the door behind you.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I say, even though I thought Mrs. Yesler was going to take care of everything. “Is she all right?”

  Mrs. Grinold smiles faintly. “When I left, she was ranting about finding Asa Mercer and giving him a piece of her mind. And about how he should be grateful she’s a lady or she’d also give him a black eye. So, yes. I think she’ll be all right.”

  At least Mrs. D isn’t talking about going back to Lowell.

  I tell my friends good night and carry a sleepy Jer upstairs behind Mrs. Grinold. The room has clean whitewashed walls and a big iron bedstead made up with colorful blankets. The window faces away from the town, toward the dark, dense woods that roll up the hill and out of sight. There’s also a church back there, painted white like everything else in Seattle. As if people want to be exactly sure where the mud and cedar stop and the town begins.

  If there’s a church, there’s got to be a school.

  Mrs. D is in front of the mirror, busily wrapping her hair in rags to make curls. Her Sunday dress hangs on a peg by the window, sponged clean of the worst grime. She’s muttering very dark things about Mr. Mercer to her narrow-eyed reflection.

  I put Jer to bed, then pull the pamphlet out of my carpetbag and read just the improvements.

  It’s got to look better tomorrow. This is Washington Territory, after all. A whole continent away from everything we left behind.

  The bachelors are in the parlor again first thing when Jer and I come down to breakfast. To a man, they stand up when I walk through toward the dining room. When they see it’s a kid and not one of the Mercer Girls, they slump into their chairs and wring their hats and go back to studying the doorway.

  All except Mr. Wright. He holds up a piece of jerky and makes a show of gnawing it.

  “Not for eat!” Jer shouts.

  After breakfast Jer and I visit the common in front of the Occidental. It’s situated at the tip of the triangle made by the streets. The bay and sky are the same flat gray, but at least it’s not raining anymore. Some Indians are tending their canoes, and logs are bumping down the mill road and splashing into the water.

  It’s still early. Maybe the bustling starts up later in the day.

  “C’mon, Jer,” I say, “let’s go find the school.”

  “We go inna tarij?” he asks hopefully.

  “I don’t know if there are even any horses here.”

  Most of the buildings are south of us, but I’m not sure which are the dens of vice Nell was talking about, so we head north.

  Trees are everywhere, and they are not the spindly, spiky palms of Rio. They’re leafy like oaks and bushy like fir, and they are massive. Not a one is smaller around than Jer, and lots are wider than my arm stretched out. Some lingering stumps are bigger still. They shoot up taller than anything ought to, and they smell damp and old and weather-beaten.

  We come upon a house that doesn’t belong on a muddy street at the edge of the world. It’s two stories tall and made of milled boards with a proper brick chimney. The bay swims in reflections off real glass windows, and there’s red-painted scrollwork along the porch. It’s so much like our old farmhouse that I blink back sudden, hot tears.

  A girl my age steps onto the porch. She’s barefoot, her skirts are kilted up, and she’s carrying a dented tin pail that just might hold her dinner for school.

  Flora is keeping the light. Nell will spend all day being toasted at socials with Ida and Julia and the others.

  It’s been four months since we steamed out of New York harbor. Four months and four thousand miles, and I’ve been a school-boat invigilator, a naval combat veteran, a reluctant sock mill worker, a petty thief, and a whist novice. If that’s not the opposite of poor dear, I don’t know what is.

  I lift a hand and call, “Hello!”

  The girl waves back and comes down the walkway, swinging her pail. “You must be from the Mercer party! What a to-do, right? I’m Evie. Mother says the whole Mercer mess really is a shame, but of course that’s not your fault. I never thought there’d be anyone my age. It was going to be seven hundred unmarried young ladies, and Mother couldn’t say anything but Where are we going to put them all?”

  Evie laughs, and I laugh too, because who’d have thought no one got what they expected from Asa Mercer?

  “I’m off to meet my friends and see if the boys are using the woods fort,” Evie goes on. “You and your brother could come, if you want. If your mother says you can. Not everyone’s mother is all right with her playing in the woods, but it’s perfectly safe. Great fun, too.”

  Chances are good Mrs. D is in the parlor of the Occidental right now. She’s likely sitting stiffly on a horsehide chair and making all the bachelors uncomfortable by asking each one if he knows a banker or a doctor or a lawyer who’s looking for a refined East Coast wife to keep house for him.

  “It’s my stepmother,” I reply, “and I don’t think she’ll mind.”

  Jer skips ahead of us through the puddles.

  “A ship arriving is a big occasion,” Evie says, “but girls arriving? Simply does not happen. So, believe me, my friends will be desperate to meet you. Especially if you tell us absolutely everything about the trip.”

  She links arms with me like Elizabeth used to, and all at once I’m back in the schoolyard and Jer isn’t born yet and Beatrice and I are at either end of a skipping rope twirling as fast as we can while Violet’s feet flash against the ground like a galloping horse.

  Evie’s friends are Jenny—“Eugenie, but only my mother calls me that”—and sisters Inez and Madge.

  “The voyage wasn’t really as tame as they say, was it?” Madge looks skeptical and more than a little disappointed. “No storms? No pirates? No one hanged from the yardarm?”

  “You’ll tell us the good parts, won’t you, Jane?” Inez begs. “The older girls pat us on the head and tell us to run along.”

  “Our very own informant.” Evie nudges me as playfully as Nell might, so I do my best to answer their excited, nonstop questions, and every now and then I work in one of my own.

  Are you really from Boston? Lowell? Where’s that? What was it like on the ship? That Mr. Mercer, can you believe his nerve? My father says he’ll skip town before too long. Town? Sure, we’ll show you around! Up north of the mill road’s where people live, and south of it is where the stores and such are. But only on Commercial Street and some parts of Occidental Street. The rest we call down on the sawdust because it used to be all tidelands till old Dutch Ned started dumping the sawdust from Yesler’s mill to fill it in. Down on the sawdust’s where all the card rooms and gambling parlors and other places we’re not supposed to know about are. Come, let’s start with the bakery.

  The bakery is a breath of yeasty goodness against the brine, and there are several general stores, a brewery, a druggist, a photographer, a few eateries, a newspaper, and a dress shop.

  And no looms. Not a single clattery, bothersome one.

  No one’s talking about handsome officers or fashionable hats. Inez is hoping we can play dolls later—we—and Jenny’s pointing out the best berry bushes, and Evie swings her pail like we’re listening for the school bell.

  I love Flora an
d Nell dearly, but both thought hopscotch was a baby game.

  “Where’s the school?” I ask.

  Evie sighs, but Inez helpfully points up the hill at a stately white building perched on a knoll. “That’s our university. We haven’t even been a territory fifteen years, and already we’ve got a proper university.”

  “Just because your uncle donated the land . . . ,” Jenny mutters.

  “That’s not the mayor’s house?” I peer at it again.

  Evie snickers. “We haven’t even got a mayor.”

  “But . . . what about school for kids?” I ask. “You all go to school. Right?”

  “Sure we do,” Madge says. “Whenever there’s a school running.”

  “You mean you’re already out for summer?” I frown. “It’s nowhere near warm enough.”

  Jenny’s squinting like she’s trying to recall. “Mrs. Carr taught a summer session a few years ago. Remember?”

  “Oh, and Miss Gallagher, who came with Mr. Mercer’s first expedition, taught us last winter,” Inez puts in. “I liked her. It’s a shame she got married.”

  My mouth is going dry. “That’s not right. School just . . . is. It gets out for the summer because it’s so hot, then in autumn when the weather’s cooler, you come back.”

  “That’s the way it works back East, you mean,” Jenny says. “There’s nothing like that here. We go when there’s a teacher willing to teach us and our parents have money to pay for it.”

  “Another girl who came with Mr. Mercer’s first expedition keeps writing letters to the territorial legislature. Antoinette Baker. She’s trying to make them give money to build a schoolhouse here in Seattle, so everyone can go and no one has to pay.” Madge kicks a rock. “That sounds like what you mean.”

  “To pay her to be the teacher,” Evie adds with a grin.

  I’ve stopped walking. Right in the middle of the street. “No. No, there have to be schools.”

  “Maybe one of the girls who came on your boat will offer lessons,” Jenny says. “Then, I imagine we’ll all go. You’re nearly twelve, right? Like Inez and Evie? The three of you will probably be able to sit together. I promise I won’t pull your hair.”